Not Their Finest Hour

By David Stafford

Published: September 17, 2000

STRANGE VICTORY

Hitler's Conquest of France.

By Ernest R. May.

Illustrated. 594 pp. New York:

Hill & Wang. $30.

The defeat of France in 1940 ranks as one of the greatest military catastrophes of the 20th century. Certainly it was the most rapid and unexpected. Germany launched its blitzkrieg offensive against the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, and within days its panzers had broken through French defenses in the Ardennes. Barely seven weeks later, an exultant Hitler, visiting Paris for the first and only time in his life, posed like a tourist for cameras in front of the Eiffel Tower. Adding humiliation to injury, he forced France to sign a surrender in the same railway carriage at Compiegne where Germany had capitulated 22 years before.

Hitler's triumphant gamble in the west was a defining moment of the Second World War. Giddy with victory, he began planning an attack on the Soviet Union. France sought salvation in the Vichy regime of its First World War hero, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and embarked on four dismal years of collaboration with Hitler's New Order in Europe, an episode that still haunts its history. And in the finger pointing that followed in occupied France, strident voices found deep and disturbing explanations for the deluge. Politicians assailed the military establishment for capitulating. Generals berated the Third Republic. Vichyites denounced the left, while the left lambasted the bourgeoisie for preferring Hitler to social reform. Yet for all the clamor, one thing they shared was the belief that more was at stake than a simple military defeat. France had been rotten at the core, a sick and demoralized nation defeated even before it began. Historians later picked up the theme. Paralyzed by a defensive mentality, badly led, entrenched behind the Maginot Line and overwhelmed by German strength, France had gone down like a lamb.

Ernest R. May, a professor of history at Harvard and the author of ''Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France,'' will have none of this. Panzer-like, he sweeps it aside as myth. France and its Allies, he points out, had more trained men, more guns, more and better tanks and more bombers and fighters than did Germany. The French military and political leaders, Gen. Maurice Gamelin and edouard Daladier, were held in high regard. Neville Chamberlain, Britain's long-maligned prime minister, was strong, not weak. The French went to war determined and confident. Here, as in his title, May deliberately echoes the classic study of 1940, ''Strange Defeat,'' by the French historian Marc Bloch, who fought in the campaign, observed the gallantry of his fellow French soldiers and was later murdered by the Nazis for joining the Resistance. If anyone feared the outcome of the battle, May argues, it was Hitler's cautious generals.

So what went wrong? Simply put, France misjudged German intentions. If the French had anticipated the Ardennes offensive, it is doubtful that they would have been defeated when and as they were. The whole affair, May argues, is a classic case of intelligence surprise.

Two models exist for comparison, both from World War II. In the first, Pearl Harbor, a blizzard of misleading signals (''noise'' in intelligence jargon) obscured the real target. In the second, Hitler's sudden invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, signals that any reasonable person would have taken seriously were ignored by Stalin, who was convinced they were planted by British intelligence. The surprise suffered in May 1940 by France and Britain best fits the Soviet invasion model. While there was plenty of noise, there were also many clear signals of Germany's plans. Astonishingly, Allied leaders continually discounted the idea that Germany's main thrust might come through the Ardennes.

May, the editor of a groundbreaking volume on intelligence gathering, ''Knowing One's Enemy,'' is not always persuasive. Sometimes the principal Allied leaders sabotage his arguments with words from their own mouths, as when Daladier complains that the people want him to lead or when Chamberlain predicts in the summer of 1939 that Hitler would be happy to compromise. Yet by looking at the campaign from both the French and German perspectives, and by shining a spotlight on intelligence, he has written an important and original account of the events of 1940. May also draws relevant lessons for the present. What can Americans learn from this disaster that might be of use in the dangerous and unstable post-cold-war world?

Throwing more money at intelligence agencies is obviously not the answer. There is little doubt that French intelligence had excellent sources, with a remarkable agent network, a sophisticated signals intelligence bureau and superb photoreconnaissance. But there were two main problems. First, as May reminds us, intelligence assessments are almost always a ''social construction'' -- that is, created for, and colored by, a particular agenda. French intelligence in the 1930's exaggerated German strength in order to boost the campaign for rearmament, a tactic that ultimately backfired by weakening French confidence. Second, unlike the Germans, the French failed to assimilate their intelligence with operational planning and thus willfully blinded themselves to much that was going on. Their principal intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Maurice-Henri Gauche, was an amiable but ponderous man who peered at the world through a pince-nez and had an extraordinary affection for a tame parrot. Such birds, of course, only mimic and never challenge their masters.

Paradoxically, the Germans had weaker intelligence sources but a better understanding of their opponents. Gen. Kurt von Tippelskirch, head of army intelligence, drew shrewdly on his personal knowledge of the French to highlight their sclerotic procedures. Even Hitler, for all his rabid prejudices, sized up the caliber of his opponents better than they did his -- at least in this case. His political nose later proved disastrous in assessing Stalin and Roosevelt.

In the end, the decisive factor was imagination -- that powerful human tool so dismally neglected in our technocratic age. Because the Germans had the imagination to think differently and daringly about their offensive, they were in a better position to respond to French and British decisions, and to take risks. May closes with the injunction of Oliver Cromwell in 1650 to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: ''I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.'' The quotation should sit on the desk of every director of central intelligence.

David Stafford's most recent book, ''Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets,'' will be published in October.